Her Eyes are Wild

William Wordsworth, paul t conneally & debra woolard bender

I. Her Eyes are Wild
William Wordsworth
1798

HER eyes are wild, her head is bare,
The sun has burnt her coal-black hair;
Her eyebrows have a rusty stain,
And she came far from over the main.
She has a baby on her arm,
Or else she were alone:
And underneath the hay-stack warm,
And on the greenwood stone,
She talked and sung the woods among,
And it was in the English tongue.

HER EYES ARE WILD
paul t conneally & debra woolard bender
2001

warmer than summer
underneath the haystack
the English tongue

she drinks beer
from the supermarket
in the town square
feeding potato-chips
to pigeons and sparrows

how far I've travelled to find
one need replaces another

her dog growls
at midnight revellers
coming too close
as she sleeps soundly
in the shoe-shop doorway

the night in my hair
turns black
burning stars

May 2001 - paul t conneally & debra woolard bender

This work is inspired by a Wordsworth's poem "Her Eyes are Wild "written in 1798. Two poets, Debra in the USA and Paul in the UK, linked by their haiku, zip poetry and tanka.

Debra Woolard Bender is a poet and artist residing in Orlando, Florida, USA. Over the last year and a half, her focus has been on haiku and related genres of poetry, both traditional and experimental. She maintains a personal website, "Paper Lanterns," an internet resource library for Asian verse with personal and collaborative poetry pages.
Debra is Development Advisor for the World Haiku Club and Editor-in-Chief of The World Haiku Review, the quarterly magazine of the WHC. In addition to solo and "symbiotic" (linking) poetry, Debra has often collaborated with Paul Conneally and other artists and poets in Arts-Rens for his "haikumania" website.

Paul T Conneally is a haikai poet/artist/musician living in Loughborough, Charnwood, UK. Paul runs the "haikumania" project and has worked with and to encourage the development of all forms of haikai verse and linked Arts-Ren with many poets and artists around the world. He also specialises in "street workshops" where he engages with communities on the streets in "haiku encounters". Exploring the connections between haiku poetry, haiku poets, and other forms of poetry has led to his exploration of haiku in relation to the English Romantic and Nature poets - including his explorations with Debra Woolard Bender and Susumu Takiguchi of the poetry of William Wordsworth. Paul is Education and Regional Director of the World Haiku Club and World Haiku Festival. He is also a member of Charnwood Arts - a community arts organisation based in Loughborough, UK. He believes that by connecting we can change the world.

Susumu Takiguchi (pen name, Ryuseki) is a Japanese artist, poet, lecturer and essayist who has been resident in England since 1971. He is the Chairman of the World Haiku Club and Managing Editor of The World Haiku Review. His web gallery is "Floating Stone". As a young boy, he studied under the tutelage of a local artist Shinichiro Murakami, the father of the novelist Ryu Murakami. He was also influenced by his uncle Yoshitada, who is a banker/artist. He received further training in painting from various artists who taught at different art clubs and private schools to which he belonged. In the field of haiku, Takiguchi's great uncle, Naoh Kataoka, was a close pupil of Takahama Kyoshi (1874-1959). Born into a family versed in haiku and other Japanese literary tradition, he dabbled in haiku as a young boy and has enjoyed the art ever since - nearly fifty years.

The Wordsworth Papers
The "Wordsworth Papers" ren is inspired by the Japanese renga, or renku, linked poetry. Also based on the concept of "found poetry", the links in "Wordsworth Papers" are drawn from words and images in those poems which have a haiku-like quality through perception and observation. The series spans time, space and cultures. It begins and is interspersed with the nine poems by William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), first linked to by Debra's haiku and "zip" poetry (a 2-line haiku analogue form developed by poetry editor, John E. Carley, Pennines, UK), followed with inserted links of tanka by Paul. It ends with a selection from "The Records of a Weather Exposed Skeleton" by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), one of the four greats of haiku poetry, and Susumu Takiguchi's copy-drawing from a chalk portrait of Wordsworth by Henry William Pickersgill (1782-1875).